Abilene Motor Express....A New Place To Call Home

Three Abilene trucks delivered this morning to Volvo Reno.

Then we all got a load assignment hauling Starbucks from Carson City. I'm headed to Lebanon, TN. Dunno if they're headed the same place I am, though.

Gonna be a squeaker to make on-time delivery. I'm running on recap and have barely enough time to get there -- and I gotta get a trailer tire repaired on the way, preferably before I leave Nevada.

 

Yeah, Im going same place as you in Lebanon. Other driver prob is too. Ill have to park it once loaded since Im up against my 14. Def going to be a squeaker for me too. Im in the volvo. Double check addresses on bills and qualcomm. There is the main Starbucks warehouse and the off site warehouse. They are down the road from each other. Last time I did this run Qualcomm said go to offsite on international dr and paper work said main warehouse on Hixson. Paper work was correct and Qualcomm wrong.

 

Taking a few days of R&R in SC. The storm finally arrived here. Just some wind and rain. Nothing big at all... seen worse thunderstorms.

always glad when it’s less than expected.

 

Got my trailer tire replaced yesterday in Fernley, NV. Soon as we pulled into the bay and got done with all the preliminaries, I hopped in the back and got on my laptop. My daughter looked at me and said "Are we really going to be here that long?" I said "Oh yeah." Two hours later the shop finally got the authorization to perform the fifteen-minute repair.

By that time my 14 was down to 50 minutes or so, and the next truck stop was an hour and a half away. So I decided to park at the PFJ right next door and call it a day.

My choices would come back to haunt me later, however, because long about midnight my time (I never bother adjusting my clock when I'm out west because I'm never out there long enough to make the effort worthwhile), my daughter and I were both rudely awakened from a sound sleep when the truck next to us laid on its air horn.

I jumped up front to see what the drama was all about, and to make sure my truck wasn't in any danger from whatever was causing this guy to blast his horn at 9:00pm local time.

Aaaand...nothing. No danger. No obvious threats. Everything looked fine. Not only that, but there wasn't even anybody in the driver's seat.

Puzzled, I shrugged my shoulders and crawled back in the bunk.

Five minutes later it happened again. Several short bursts of air horn followed by one long 10-15 second blast. By this time I was back up front again, and even though the horn was blaring away there still wasn't anybody in the driver's seat.

Couldn't figure out what was causing the horn to go off. Some kind of anti-theft alarm hoing haywire, maybe? Like when a neighbor's car alarm goes off at 2:00am because a cat jumped on the hood?

Turns out I wasn't far off.

The driver had adjusted the steering wheel so that the wheel itself was almost parallel to the ground. And there was a small dog in the truck using the steering wheel as a way to climb up and down off the dashboard. And the air horn was being triggered by whatever button the dog was standing on while he was waiting for his owner to get back to the truck.

The dog set off the horn two more times after that, and by the time I finally fell back asleep I was thinking pretty dark thoughts about that dog...

 

Trained Guard Dog... simply announcing to the whole world that this Truck is under his protection... lol

 

The thing ive found with breakdown is,if you keep calling them things usually go smooth.Once they take the pictures to send over,call'em again to get it approved.

A week ago I was at a love's getting a tire repaired,and I didn't even call them till love's took the pictures and sent them over.

I learned early on if you wait for them to approve it,without calling back you'll wait forever.

 

They require pictures now!!!!

 

It’s part of the Knight business plan. Hire a bunch of fresh college grads who don’t have a clue. Gotta get them pictures so they can figure out what’s wrong.